Thomas Bernhard Quotes

Consciousness is indeed always with us. Everyone knows 'I am!' No one can deny his own being.

Life is a state of consciousness.

Life is but thought.

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

At times I think and at times I am.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

Life is consciousness.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

All of us have life; few of us have an idea of it.

I am me, whatever that means. I am conscious.

The meaning of life is found in openness to being and "being present" in full awareness.

When you happy, you get locked in sleep. You get sleepy happy. I always wanna be on point. I always wanna be aware.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.

How do you know, right now, that you are aware of being aware, or conscious?

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

In my definition of consciousness, consciousness is the same thing as life. What wisdom traditions also call spirit.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.